“Environmental Insults” — the kind that kill you slowly

I expect most of you follow Eric’s ongoing crusade to get some satisfaction on the SUNY New Paltz dorms that still register traces of dioxin contamination … I’ve included links to review, if you don’t. I’m not “scientifically inclined,” myself, so I won’t speak to the specifics, E does a fine job — but I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck, either. Scientific method is too stark a playground for my sensibilities but I have no trouble at all understanding the “if, then” hypothesis. Clearly, “if” you don’t pay attention to the details of what is toxic in your environment, “then” you will suffer — and perhaps your children … and theirs, as well.

What Eric and his dedicated handful of concerned citizens are facing down is the classic “What you don’t know won’t hurt you” lie that is used by the Have’s to expediently capitalize on opportunity while caring not a whit that they victimize the Have Not’s. Think “Erin Brockovich” and magnify it times hundreds of thousands of silent and covert assaults on the environment, each of them effecting the whole of our well-being on this planet. In the SUNY case, of course, there is a bit more “Have” than not — these aren’t indigenous tribes being manipulated and plundered for their resources — they’re middle class parents and college kids, clueless that the money they’re spending to assure safe housing is a sham. Ironic that college is the place where we’re taught to think, to examine all of the variables, while the variables that need to be examined in this instance are shushed and buried.

I’m a little sensitive about this kind of thing, having been [covertly and purposely] exposed to a biological agent by my own government, as a child [I wrote about it back in ‘04, its in the archives if you’re interested in the details.] The results of that little “experiment” have defined my health issues since. What health issues will some of these SUNY graduates carry with them? And what might they pass along in their DNA?

Life is infinitely more complex than the obvious — the mapping of the human genome is giving us a wealth of information on how all the different bits and pieces weave together to make the whole of our bodies. For instance, a new study shows that stress is a major factor of bleeding gums and tooth loss, due to increased levels of cortisol — it isn’t just poor hygene and neglect, the handy stereotype for this kind of thing. A new study on obesity has revealed that the hormone leptin, produced by fat cells, informs our brains to crave and eat … or not, depending on the levels produced; it isn’t just gluttony and errant self-discipline that creates the obese among us, although we still buy that for a buck and make them “invisible” socially.

We’re given a “heads up” on these biological connections constantly, if we connect a dot or two — one that gives me fits is an often-shown commercial for a med to counteract RLS … Restless Leg Syndrome [which appears to be a Designer Condition I’d never heard of before — I’m sure those who suffer it would bite me for calling it that, but in my defense I’ll plead “sick-unto-death-of-treating-effect-rather-than-cause’ism.”] The commercial to which I refer is nicely done, not terribly annoying — but the thing you need to pay attention to is the last of it, where they quickly quickly list the contra-indicators. If you use the product advertised, DO tell your physician if you are suddenly seized with a compulsion for sex or gambling. Ummm … pardon me? Uncontrollable sex and gambling? What part of the brain does THIS stuff stimulate? And what a potentially disastrous price to pay among your peers, your family, your own self-esteem to keep your legs from going a’twitter!

It’s intellectually lazy to take everything at face value — but it didn’t used to be so hazardous to our health and well being. One of the articles below tells us that when our own DNA combines with what it calls “environmental insults,” it turns on potential for disease. How much of an insult is dioxin, do you think? And given the turn-back in environmental protections, how many “insults” do you think we can handle, globally, and still remain at the top of the food chain? By any stretch of logic or wishful thinking can we consider the epidemic of autism in our children “random?” Out of control corporatism and unregulated capitalism, complicit with an unethical government, has become a consistent gateway to danger.

The toxins that assault us are most often socio-political as well as biological, as in New Paltz. Read that “pack o’ lies.” Consider, for instance, the lies military recruiters tell our kids, potential young fodder for their many wars. They’re promised incentive pay to sign up that would make the average teen drool — sometimes as much as $50,000 — and they’re assured that they will get their choice of occupation and station. After they’ve signed on the dotted line, the charade is over … and the canny recruiter can point to this bit of legaleze at the bottom of their contract:

“Laws and regulations that govern military personnel may change without notice to me. Such changes may affect my status, pay allowances, benefits, and responsibilities as a member of the Armed Forces REGARDLESS of the provisions of this enlistment / re-enlistment document.”

And while we’re talking about victimizing kids, what about college lending? Every youngster that gets as far as the campus steps is lured into getting a free case of Pepsi and a nice sun visor emblazoned with the university logo if they’ll just sign up for a credit card; and those requiring student loans usually take the advice of their school professionals, unaware that some of them get kickbacks from what’s called “preferred lender agreements.” An article that busted some universities in Michigan included this quote:

“The bottom line is, students trust their schools, and they trust their alumni associations that are affiliated with their schools. They trust … the athletic departments of their schools,” Lawsky said. “What we’re looking at is based on that trust.”

I expect the young people and parents at SUNY New Paltz trust their school, as well. I suppose that when they visit those infamous dorms, they see them as a safe haven for the educational experience ahead. I’d think they naively expect any irregularities or dangers to be pointed out by the administration, so they can make informed choices. What they don’t know CAN hurt them. I think it’s clear that getting a bigger picture of life in the Aughts requires a lot more effort than it used to, kids — being an informed consumer has never been so important.

Unless we begin to think of everything in terms of the energetic whole, we’ll continue to make grievous errors — until we look at everything around us as manipulated for someones best interests and realize it might not be our own, we will continue to suffer the consequences, sometimes dire — unless we take the offenses and dangers in our own neighborhoods personally, we won’t add to the solution — and unless we decide a solution is mandatory for a future we can recognize, it won’t happen.

Meanwhile, we keep ourselves informed … because clearly, nobody will do it for us. There are links and a couple of important reads below, including a health warning about plastics.

Jude

Where’s Your Data?
Contaminated dorms in New Paltz are set to open yet again, as state officials drag their feet on new safety testing.
A Planet Waves special report by Eric Francis.

One Foot on a Banana Peel, One Foot in the General Electric PR Department
By Eric Francis

Our Assumptions About What Causes Chronic Diseases Could Be Wrong
Laura Wright, OnEarth Magazine
August 9, 2007

Martha Herbert, a pediatric neurologist at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, studies brain images of children with autism. She was seeing patients one day a few years ago when a 3-year-old girl walked in with more than the usual cognitive and behavioral problems.

She was lactose intolerant, and foods containing gluten always seemed to upset her stomach. Autistic children suffer profoundly, and not just in their difficulty forming emotional bonds with family members, making friends, or tolerating minor deviations from their daily routines.

Herbert has seen many young children who’ve had a dozen or more ear infections by the time they made their way through her door, and many others — “gut kids” — with chronic diarrhea and other gastrointestinal problems, including severe food allergies. Such symptoms don’t fit with the traditional explanation of autism as a genetic disorder rooted in the brain, and that was precisely what was on Herbert’s mind that day. She’s seen too many kids whose entire systems have gone haywire.

During the course of the little girl’s appointment, Herbert learned that the child’s father was a computer scientist — a bioinformatist no less, someone trained to crunch biological data and pick out patterns of interest. She shared with him her belief that autism research was overly focused on examining genes that play a role in brain development and function, to the exclusion of other factors — namely, children’s susceptibility to environmental insults, such as exposure to chemicals and toxic substances.

Inspired by their conversation, Herbert left the office that day with a plan: She and the girl’s father, John Russo, head of computer science at the Wentworth Institute of Technology, would cobble together a team of geneticists and bioinformatists to root through the scientific literature looking for genes that might be involved in autism without necessarily being related to brain development or the nervous system.

The group scanned databases of genes already known to respond to chemicals in the environment, selecting those that lie within sequences of DNA with suspected ties to autism. They came up with more than a hundred matches, reinforcing Herbert’s belief that such chemicals interact with specific genes to make certain children susceptible to autism.

Although some diseases are inherited through a single genetic mutation — cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia are examples — the classic “one gene, one disease” model doesn’t adequately explain the complex interplay between an individual’s unique genetic code and his or her personal history of environmental exposures.

That fragile web of interactions, when pulled out of alignment, is probably what causes many chronic diseases: cancer, obesity, asthma, heart disease, autism, and Alzheimer’s, to name just a few.

To unravel the underlying biological mechanisms of these seemingly intractable ailments requires that scientists understand the precise molecular dialogue that occurs between our genes and the environment — where we live and work, what we eat, drink, breathe, and put on our skin.

Herbert’s literature scan was a nod in this direction, but actually teasing out the answers in a laboratory has been well beyond her or anyone else’s reach — until now.

Consider for a moment that humans have some 30,000 genes, which interact in any number of ways with one or more of the 85,000 synthetic, commercially produced chemicals, as well as heavy metals, foods, drugs, myriad pollutants in the air and water, and anything else our bodies absorb from the environment.

The completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 armed scientists with a basic road map of every gene in the human body, allowing them to probe more deeply into the ways our DNA controls who we are and why we get sick, in part by broadening our understanding of how genes respond to external factors.

In the years leading up to the project’s completion, scientists began developing powerful new tools for studying our genes. One is something called a gene chip, or DNA microarray, which came about through the marriage of molecular biology and computer science. The earliest prototype was devised about a decade ago; since then these tiny devices, as well as other molecular investigative tools, have grown exponentially in their sophistication, pushing medical science toward a new frontier.

Gene chips are small, often no larger than your typical domino or glass laboratory slide, yet they can hold many thousands of genes at a time. Human genes are synthesized and bound to the surface of the chip such that a single copy of each gene — up to every gene in an organism’s entire genome — is affixed in a grid pattern. The DNA microarray allows scientists to take a molecular snapshot of the activity of every gene in a cell at a given moment in time.

The process works this way: Every cell in your body contains the same DNA, but DNA activity — or expression — is different in a liver cell, say, than it is in a lung, brain, or immune cell. Suppose a scientist wishes to analyze the effect of a particular pesticide on gene activity in liver cells. (This makes sense, since it is the liver that processes and purges many toxins from the body.)

A researcher would first expose a liver cell culture in a test tube to a precise dose of the chemical. A gene’s activity is observed through the action of its RNA, molecules that convey the chemical messages issued by DNA.

RNA is extracted from the test tube, suspended in a solution, then poured over the gene chip. Any given RNA molecule will latch on only to the specific gene that generated it. The genes on the chip with the most RNA stuck to them are the ones that were most active in the liver cells, or most “highly expressed.”

The genes that don’t have any RNA stuck to them are said to be “turned off” in those cells. Scientists use the microarray to compare the exposed cells to non-exposed, control cells (see sidebar). Those genes that show activity in the exposed cells but not in the control cells, or vice versa, are the ones that may have been most affected by the pesticide exposure.

DNA microarrays open the door to an entirely new way of safety-testing synthetic chemicals: Each chemical alters the pattern of gene activity in specific ways, and thus possesses a unique genetic fingerprint. If a chemical’s genetic fingerprint closely matches that of another substance already known to be toxic, there is good reason to suspect that that chemical can also do us harm.

Ultimately, government agencies charged with regulating chemicals and protecting our health could use this method, one aspect of a field called toxicogenomics, to wade through the thousands of untested or inadequately studied chemicals that circulate in our environment.

In other words, these agencies could make our world safer by identifying — and, one hopes, banning — hazardous substances.

For such a young field, toxicogenomics has already begun to challenge some fundamental assumptions about the origins of disease and the mechanisms through which chemicals and various environmental exposures affect our bodies.

Consider the case of mercury, which was identified as poisonous many centuries ago. Its potential to wreak havoc on the human nervous system was most tragically demonstrated in the mass poisoning of the Japanese fishing village of Minamata in the 1950s. More recently, scientists have begun to amass evidence suggesting that mercury also harms the immune system.

In 2001, Jennifer Sass, a neurotoxicologist and senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), who was then a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, designed an experiment that included the use of microarrays and other molecular tools to figure out how, exactly, mercury was interfering with both our nervous and immune systems.

She grew cells in test tubes — one set for mouse brain cells, another for mouse liver cells — and exposed them to various doses of mercury so that she could see which genes were being switched on and off in the presence of the toxic metal. In the brain and the liver cells, she noticed unusual activity in the gene interleukin-6, which both responds to infection and directs the development of neurons.

“We thought we had mercury figured out,” says Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University, who collaborated with Sass on the study. Genomic tools may identify effects of other chemicals by allowing scientists to “go fishing,” as Silbergeld puts it, for things they didn’t know to look for.

The findings of Sass, Silbergeld, and others indicate that mercury might play a role in the development of diseases involving immune system dysfunction. These diseases perhaps include autism — think of Herbert’s patients with their inexplicable collection of infections and allergies — but also the spate of autoimmune disorders that we can’t fully explain, from Graves’ disease and rheumatoid arthritis to multiple sclerosis and lupus.

“Do we need to reevaluate our fish advisories?” Silbergeld asks. “Are our regulations actually protecting the most sensitive people?” We target pregnant women and children because we’ve presumed that mercury’s neurotoxic effects are most damaging to those whose brains are still developing…

Sass and Silbergeld’s findings don’t contradict that assumption, but they do suggest that there might be other adults who are far more vulnerable than we’d realized — who simply can’t tolerate the more subtle effect the metal has on their immune system because of a peculiarity in their genetic makeup. Designing fish advisories for those people, whose sensitivities are coded in their DNA, is a challenge we’ve never tackled before.

Translating new findings about how chemicals affect gene activity into something of broader public health value will require that we understand precisely the tiny genetic differences among us that make one person or group of people more vulnerable than others to certain environmental exposures.

One way to do that is by slightly modifying the gene chip to allow researchers to scan up to a million common genetic variants — alternate spellings of genes, so to speak, that differ by just a single letter — to look for small differences that might make some people more likely to get sick from a toxic exposure.

Our attempts to identify those who are most genetically susceptible to developing a particular disease as a result of environmental exposures have already yielded important insights. Patricia Buffler, dean emerita of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that children with a certain genetic variant may be susceptible to developing leukemia in high-traffic areas, where they’re likely to be exposed to benzene compounds in auto exhaust.

Other studies have found that a particular genetic variation in some women who drink chlorinated municipal water leads to an increased likelihood that they’ll give birth to underweight babies. Still others have found that a specific version of an immune gene, HLA-DP, renders people vulnerable to the toxic effects of the metal beryllium, which causes a chronic lung condition in the genetically sensitive population.

This particular vulnerability raises some sticky workplace issues. Toxic exposure to beryllium occurs almost exclusively in industrial settings where welders and other machinists come in contact with the metal while making defense industry equipment, computers, and other electronics. Should employers test their workers for genetic variants that may put them at risk for developing a disease? Could that information be used to bar someone from a job? Such ethical considerations, and their legal and public policy ramifications, will only multiply as we learn more.

But first, a more fundamental question: Do we even understand what today’s chronic diseases are? It is beginning to appear that what we call autism may in fact be many illnesses that we’ve lumped together because those who are afflicted seem to behave similarly.

Doctors base their diagnosis on behavioral symptoms, not on what caused those symptoms. Some scientists now refer to the condition as “autisms,” acknowledging that we’ve yet to find a single, unifying biological mechanism, despite the identification, in some studies, of a handful of genes that may confer increased vulnerability.

But then, genes or environmental exposures that appear to be important causal factors in one study may not show up at all in another. This leaves scientists to wonder whether the problem isn’t that the disease is so diverse in its biological origins that only a truly massive study — involving many thousands of patients — would have the statistical power to tease apart the various factors involved.

The same difficulty probably holds true for many chronic diseases, explains Linda Greer, a toxicologist and director of the health program at NRDC. “What we think of as asthma, for example, is probably not one condition at all. It’s probably many different diseases that today we simply call asthma.”

Seemingly contradictory explanations for the epidemic could all turn out to be true. Until we are able to sift out what makes one asthmatic child different from the next — how and why their respective molecular makeups differ — treatments or preventive measures that work for one child will continue to fail for another.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Muin Khoury, the director of the National Office of Public Health Genomics, has created theoretical models to try to figure out just how many different factors may be involved in most chronic diseases. His findings suggest that some combination of 10 to 20 genes plus a similar number of environmental influences could explain most of the complex chronic diseases that plague the population.

But to analyze how even a dozen genes interact with a dozen environmental exposures across large populations requires vast studies: immense numbers of people and huge volumes of data — everything from precise measurements of gene activity inside cells to exact recordkeeping of subject'’ exposure to environmental hazards. Microarrays and other molecular tools now make such studies possible.

In 2003, Columbia University and the Norwegian government together launched the Autism Birth Cohort, one of the largest autism investigations in history. The study will track 100,000 Norwegian mothers and children — from before birth through age 18 — collecting clinical data, blood, urine, and other biological materials. It will also collect RNA in order to analyze gene activity.

Though initial results are due in 2011, it will take decades to complete this study, and RNA samples will have to be painstakingly archived while the investigators await additional funding. Although the current study is not focused on environmental health per se, researchers plan to measure a variety of biological exposures — including infection, environmental toxins, and dietary deficiencies — in each mother and child.

As the children grow up, and as some among them develop disease, scientists will have complete records to analyze for key commonalities and differences. Which genes do the sick children have in common? Which chemical exposures were most meaningful?

The answers may provide clues not only to the origins of autism, but to many other disorders, from cerebral palsy to asthma to diabetes. Other archiving projects are even more ambitious, such as the U.K. Biobank project, which has begun to enroll 500,000 people to create the world’s largest resource for studying the role of the environment and genetics in health and disease.

As vital to our understanding of human disease as such studies may prove to be, a 50-year-old taking part in the U.K. Biobank project isn’t likely to reap the rewards. “It will take a long time to make sense of the data,” says Paul Nurse, a 2001 Nobel laureate in medicine and the president of Rockefeller University.

According to Nurse, it may well be that most of the researchers starting these studies today won’t see the final results — the data will be analyzed by their children. In his estimation, that’s all the more reason “to get on with it.”

In response to concern that environmental exposures were affecting children’s health, the Clinton administration in 2000 launched the National Children’s Study, the largest such undertaking in the United States, under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health.

The goal was to enroll 100,000 children; a genetic biobanking component has since been added. Investigators have not yet recruited participants, in part because of financial uncertainties. The Bush administration’s 2007 budget proposal completely eliminated money for the study, though Congress reinstated funding in February.

The irony is that cutting funding for such projects may be the most expensive option of all. Even if we successfully address campaign-dominating political issues like skyrocketing medical costs and the growing ranks of the uninsured, our failure to consider the fundamental mechanisms of disease — the interplay between our genes and the environment — could still bankrupt us, socially if not financially.

Until we’re able to interrupt the slide toward disease much earlier, based on our developing knowledge of how genes and the environment interact, medicine will remain the practice of “putting people back together after they’ve been hit by the train,” says Wayne Matson, a colleague of Martha Herbert’s who studies Huntington’s and other neurodegenerative diseases at the Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts.

“It would be a lot better if we knew how to pull that person off the tracks in the first place.” ++

Scientists Issue Warning About Chemical in Plastic
Marla Cone. The Los Angeles Times
Thursday 02 August 2007

In an unusual effort targeting a single chemical, several dozen scientists on Thursday issued a strongly worded consensus statement warning that an estrogen-like compound in plastic is likely to be causing an array of serious reproductive disorders in people.

The compound, bisphenol A or BPA, is one of the highest-volume chemicals in the world and has found its way into the bodies of most human beings.

Used to make hard plastic, BPA can seep from beverage containers and other materials. It is used in all polycarbonate plastic baby bottles, as well as other rigid plastic items, including large water cooler containers, sports bottles and microwave oven dishes, along with canned food liners and some dental sealants for children.

The scientists - including four from federal health agencies - reviewed about 700 studies before concluding that people are exposed to levels of the chemical exceeding those that harm lab animals. Infants and fetuses are most vulnerable, they said.

The statement, published online by the journal Reproductive Toxicology, was accompanied by a new study by researchers from the National Institutes of Health finding uterine damage in newborn animals exposed to BPA. That damage is a possible predictor of reproductive diseases in women, including fibroids, endometriosis, cystic ovaries and cancers. It is the first time BPA has been linked to female reproductive tract disorders, although earlier studies have found early-stage prostate and breast cancer and decreased sperm counts in animals exposed to low doses.

The scientists’ statement and new study - along with five accompanying scientific reviews that summarize the 700 studies - intensify a highly contentious debate over whether the plastic compound poses a public threat. So far no governmental agency here or abroad has restricted its use.

Representatives of the plastics industry on Thursday lambasted the scientists as alarmist and biased, and said they based their conclusions on inconsistent and uncertain science.

“Considering many of these people have made their views known in the past, is there any surprise? Is there really anything new?” said Steve Hentges of the American Chemistry Council’s polycarbonate/BPA group.

Hentges said the scientists who signed the consensus statement were self-selected, leaving out many experts, and that many have conflicts of interest because they have either studied BPA and reported effects or “have already taken a very clear advocacy position.

“They are completely at odds with the findings of every governmental scientific body that has reviewed the same science,” he said.

Two government scientific committees in Europe and Japan recently decided there is insufficient evidence to restrict the compound. Europe’s food safety agency decided in January that the data were inconclusive, largely because of metabolic differences between mice and humans, and because it is uncertain the amounts people are exposed to pose a human health threat.

Next week, a U.S. expert panel convenes to decide whether to declare BPA a human reproductive toxin, which could be a first step toward federal regulation. The review by the panel of the federal Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction, part of the National Institutes of Health, has been controversial. The Times reported in March that its preliminary report on BPA was written by a consulting firm with financial ties to the chemical industry that has since been fired by the Center.

Frederick vom Saal, a University of Missouri at Columbia reproductive toxicologist, said the scientists’ statement on BPA “is very different than any other approach to any chemical.”

“We now have, without a doubt, the most comprehensive set of documents covering every aspect of bisphenol A and the hope here is that government panels will actually look at this information, digest it, and incorporate it into their decision-making,” said vom Saal, who is the most vocal scientist studying BPA.

No studies have been conducted looking for effects in people, and one goal of the scientists who signed the statement is to generate human research.

Jerrold Heindel, a scientist with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who organized a meeting last fall to begin drafting the statement, said even though there have been no human studies of BPA, there is now so much animal data that the 38 experts believe that potential human damage is likely. More than 150 studies have found health effects in animals exposed to low doses.

“We know what doses the animals were given, and when we look at humans, we see blood levels within that range or actually higher, which is a cause of concern and should stimulate more human research,” he said. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

1 comment August 10th, 2007

Gasp — Groan — Sigh

The crazies are loose in the world, unethical zombies with the mushy, decayed brains of their prototypes in The Night of the Living Dead – and we don’t need the majk glasses to see them, anymore. There’s either too much Prozac in the water … or not enough.

How bad is it? Read the last article here and you tell me!

Jude

Cheney urging strikes on Iran
Warren P. Strobel, John Walcott and Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers
Thu, August 9, 2007

WASHINGTON — President Bush charged Thursday that Iran continues to arm and train insurgents who are killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and he threatened action if that continues.

At a news conference Thursday, Bush said Iran had been warned of unspecified consequences if it continued its alleged support for anti-American forces in Iraq. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had conveyed the warning in meetings with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad, the president said.

Bush wasn’t specific, and a State Department official refused to elaborate on the warning.

Behind the scenes, however, the president’s top aides have been engaged in an intensive internal debate over how to respond to Iran’s support for Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and its nuclear program. Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iraq run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy.

The debate has been accompanied by a growing drumbeat of allegations about Iranian meddling in Iraq from U.S. military officers, administration officials and administration allies outside government and in the news media. It isn’t clear whether the media campaign is intended to build support for limited military action against Iran, to pressure the Iranians to curb their support for Shiite groups in Iraq or both.

Nor is it clear from the evidence the administration has presented whether Iran, which has long-standing ties to several Iraqi Shiite groups, including the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr and the Badr Organization, which is allied with the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, is a major cause of the anti-American and sectarian violence in Iraq or merely one of many. At other times, administration officials have blamed the Sunni Muslim group al Qaida in Iraq for much of the violence.

For now, however, the president appears to have settled on a policy of stepped-up military operations in Iraq aimed at the suspected Iranian networks there, combined with direct American-Iranian talks in Baghdad to try to persuade Tehran to halt its alleged meddling.

The U.S. military launched one such raid Wednesday in Baghdad’s predominantly Shiite Sadr City district.

But so far that course has failed to halt what American military officials say is a flow of sophisticated roadside bombs, known as explosively formed penetrators, into Iraq. Last month they accounted for a third of the combat deaths among U.S.-led forces, according to the military.

Cheney, who’s long been skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran’s complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq; for example, catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran, one official said.

The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk publicly about internal government deliberations.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice opposes this idea, the officials said. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has stated publicly that “we think we can handle this inside the borders of Iraq.”

Lea Anne McBride, a Cheney spokeswoman, said only that “the vice president is right where the president is” on Iran policy.

Bush left no doubt at his news conference that he intended to get tough with Iran.

“One of the main reasons that I asked Ambassador Crocker to meet with Iranians inside Iraq was to send the message that there will be consequences for . . . people transporting, delivering EFPs, highly sophisticated IEDs (improvised explosive devices), that kill Americans in Iraq,” he said.

He also appeared to call on the Iranian people to change their government.

“My message to the Iranian people is, you can do better than this current government,” he said. “You don’t have to be isolated. You don’t have to be in a position where you can’t realize your full economic potential.”

The Bush administration has launched what appears to be a coordinated campaign to pin more of Iraq’s security troubles on Iran.

Last week, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 U.S. military commander in Iraq, said Shiite militiamen had launched 73 percent of the attacks that had killed or wounded American troops in July. U.S. officials think that majority Shiite Iran is providing militiamen with EFPs, which pierce armored vehicles and explode once inside.

Last month, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a multinational force spokesman, said members of the Quds force had helped plan a January attack in the holy Shiite city of Karbala, which lead to the deaths of five American soldiers. Bergner said the military had evidence that some of the attackers had trained at Quds camps near Tehran.

Bush’s efforts to pressure Iran are complicated by the fact that the leaders of U.S.-supported governments in Iraq and Afghanistan have a more nuanced view of their neighbor.

Maliki is on a three-day visit to Tehran, during which he was photographed Wednesday hand in hand with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Unconfirmed media reports said Maliki had told Iranian officials they’d played a constructive role in the region.

Asked about that, Bush said he hadn’t been briefed on the meeting. “Now if the signal is that Iran is constructive, I will have to have a heart-to-heart with my friend the prime minister, because I don’t believe they are constructive. I don’t think he in his heart of hearts thinks they’re constructive either,” he said.

Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai differed on Iran’s role when they met last weekend, with Karzai saying in a TV interview that Iran was “a helper” and Bush challenging that view.

The toughening U.S. position on Iran puts Karzai and Iraqi leaders such as Maliki in a difficult spot between Iran, their longtime ally, and the United States, which is spending lives and treasure to secure their newly formed government.

A senior Iraqi official in Baghdad said the Iraqi government received regular intelligence briefings from the United States about suspected Iranian activities. He refused to discuss details, but said the American position worried him.

The United States is “becoming more focused on Iranian influence inside Iraq,” said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss private talks with the Americans. “And we don’t want Iraq to become a zone of conflict between Iran and the U.S.”

Proposals to use force against Iran over its actions in Iraq mark a new phase in the Bush administration’s long internal war over Iran policy.

Until now, some hawks within the administration — including Cheney — are said to have favored military strikes to stop Iran from furthering its suspected ambitions for nuclear weapons.

Rice has championed a diplomatic strategy, but that, too, has failed to deter Iran so far.
Patrick Clawson, an Iran specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said a strike on the Quds camps in Iran could make the nuclear diplomacy more difficult.

Before launching such a strike, “We better be prepared to go public with very detailed and very convincing intelligence,” Clawson said. ++

Prospects of Armageddon
The logic that defends past nuclear atrocities is now used to support a strike against Iran
Abbas Edalat and Mehrnaz Shahabi, The Guardian
Tuesday August 7, 2007

It is appalling, if unsurprising, to read the neoconservative cheerleader Oliver Kamm arguing in these pages that the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki 62 years ago saved lives and ended suffering. The subtext is plain. The same camp whose vocal endorsement led to the present catastrophe in Iraq are now hawkishly gazing at Iran. The same absurd and dangerous logic that defends the nuclear atrocities of 1945 can now be used to support the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons against Iran - the threat of which in turn makes the idea of a conventional attack appear more palatable. Now, more than ever, we should be unequivocal in our moral position: as Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has said, the mere possession of nuclear weapons today should be viewed with the same condemnation and horror as we have regarded slavery and genocide in our modern civilized world.

Astonishingly, the calamity of Iraq has failed to dampen the belligerent clique within the White House. The arrival of an IAEA team in Tehran yesterday to discuss inspections is equally unlikely to dissuade advocates of a strike, nuclear or conventional. Such an assault would be in flagrant breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but it would hardly be the first time the US has disregarded the 1968 accord.

The treaty obliges nuclear states to pursue negotiations in good faith towards cessation of the nuclear arms race and on to disarmament. It also guarantees non-nuclear states help with and access to peaceful nuclear know-how and technology.

All five original nuclear states are in violation of the treaty for failing to take effective action towards disarmament. The US systematically contravened the treaty in the 1980s and 1990s by successfully bringing pressure to bear on western governments and companies, as well as China and Russia, not to enter nuclear collaborations with Iran - which, as a signatory of the treaty, has been entitled since 1970 to receive material, technology and information for the peaceful use of nuclear power. This eventually drove Iran, after the bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear plant by Israel in 1981, on to the black market in order to pursue its nuclear programme. The subsequent partial concealment of Iran’s nuclear activities gave rise to western suspicion of its nuclear ambitions, but rarely does the media characterisation make reference to the context in which the recourse to the black market took place. It is rare, too, to see mention made of the fact that the IAEA has found no evidence of a weapons programme after over 2,200 hours of snap inspections of Iranian nuclear plants.

In marked contrast to western suspicion of Iran, the real nuclear programme in Israel has been eagerly sponsored by the governments of France, Britain and the US. They have actively supported Israel’s development of an arsenal estimated to include more than 200 warheads. It is a weapons programme Tel Aviv is determined to shroud in secrecy.

Mordechai Vanunu served an 18-year prison sentence, including 12 years in solitary confinement, after speaking publicly of Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons in 1986. Last month he was sentenced to a further six months in prison for speaking to foreigners.

Even as Iran discusses renewed inspections with the IAEA, the risk of a military attack on its nuclear facilities remains high. Israel’s threat to deploy nuclear bunker busters to destroy Iran’s weapons potential is in line with the US’s national security strategy of 2006 and the Pentagon’s doctrine for joint nuclear operations which justifies use of tactical nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states as a “deterrent”. The ultimate irony is that the leading violator of the treaty, the US, and the region’s sole nuclear power and non-signatory, Israel, are contemplating nuclear strikes on the pretext of nuclear limitation.

Last year John McCain, a Republican presidential hopeful and an advocate of keeping the military option against Iran on the table, was asked what the consequence of an attack on Iran would be. His response was only one word: “Armageddon.” After three devastating wars driven by the US, Britain and Israel since 9/11, the prospect of a catastrophic war against Iran hangs over the region.

While the world remembers Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an international statement endorsed by dozens of leading peace, anti-nuclear and community organisations in the UK, US and Israel, as well as five Nobel laureates, calls for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction. Israel could do the region a great service by announcing immediately that it is to disable its nuclear arsenal. ++

· Abbas Edalat is professor of computer science and mathematics at Imperial College London and founder of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran; Mehrnaz Shahabi is the campaign’s executive editor www.campaigniran.org

Lying Again, This Time About Iran’s Nuclear Program
Walter C. Uhler
9 August 2007

Has the United States ever had to endure a president who lies as often as George W. Bush? He repeatedly lied to the American people in order to invade Iraq. Now he is lying about Iran. Who is going to hold him accountable?

In Sept. ‘02, Bush invoked a nonexistent IAEA report to claim that Iraq was “six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon.” From that nonexistent report, Bush concluded: “I don’t know what more evidence we need.”

During his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, Bush defrauded Americans at least three times. He presented a less than candid assessment of the intelligence linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda. He also presented a less than candid assessment of the intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction. As former federal prosecutor, Elizabeth de la Vega, demonstrated in her book, U.S. v. Bush, according to Title 18, United States Code, Section 371″It is still the law of the United States that once politicians become Executive Branch officials, they are legally required to be honest and forthright about public matters.” [p. 197]
Bush then built upon these two fraudulent assessments to establish a third, Saddam’s link to 9/11: “Before September 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents and lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons, and other plans — this time armed by Saddam Hussein.”

In order to defraud the American public a third time, Bush and his speech writers employed a hallowed axiom of propaganda; one recognized by Walter Lippmann decades earlier: “[T]he more untrained the mind, the more readily it works out a theory that two things which catch its attention at the same time are causally connected.”

Bush also lied in mid-July 2003, when he told reporters that “we gave him [Saddam] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in.” In fact, Saddam did let the inspectors in. But, the Bush administration made them leave, lest they discover that no WMD existed and scotch the invasion.

In December 2003, ABC’s Diane Sawyer pressed Bush about justifying a war to the American public by stating “as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction as opposed to the possibility that he [Saddam] could move to acquire those weapons.” Put on the spot, Bush asserted: “So what’s the difference?”

In late 2005, Bush lied again, when attempting to justify his unconstitutional order permitting the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without obtaining the required court-approved warrants. Bush defended his directive as a “vital tool” in the war against terrorism, evidently forgetting that, in April 2004, he assured an audience in Buffalo, New York: “When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.”

And he lied again on December 14, 2005, when he asserted that his critics in Congress “saw the same intelligence I saw and then voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein.” In fact, Bush was receiving many more intelligence reports than any member of Congress.

Bush lied again, on the eve of the November 2006 mid-term elections, when he said that he wanted Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to stay on until the end of his presidency. In fact, Bush already had commenced work on replacing Rumsfeld and knew he was lying when he said Rumsfeld would stay on.

In a December 19, 2006, interview with the Washington Post, Bush lied again. According to the Post, when he was asked to reconcile his “absolutely, we’re winning” in Iraq assertion of October 25, 2006, with his new assertion, “We’re not winning, we’re not losing,” Bush “recast” his former assertion “as a prediction rather than an assessment.”

Just a few days ago, during his August 6, 2007 “Joint Press Availability” (mini news conference) with Afghanistan’s President Karzai, Bush lied again. This time the lie concerned Iran’s nuclear program. Bush lied after being asked to respond to Karzai’s recent assertion that Iran was playing a helpful role in Afghanistan.

Thus, after noting that it was up to Iran to prove that it is a stabilizing force in the world, Bush proceeded to lie: “After all, this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon.”

We can be sure that Bush lied, because virtually everyone, except for a few morons, knows that “the Iranian government has never articulated such a desire and in fact has repeatedly claimed, genuinely or disingenuously, the opposite.” [Farideh Farhi, “Afghanistan, Iraq and the Bush Administration’s Incoherent Iran Policy,” Informed Comment Global Affairs, Aug. 7, 2007]

Let us assure that this lie is not another lie for another war.

Yet, beyond the lies, I’ve noticed another pattern in the president’s recent speeches; suggesting a type of psychological projection that results in the “pot calling the kettle black.”
Simply read Bush’s “Joint Press Availability” assertions about Iran. But, in every sentence where you see the word “Iran,” substitute the words “United States.”.

For example: “It’s up to Iran to prove to the world that they’re a stabilizing force as opposed to a destabilizing force.” Simply insert the words “the United States,” and then recall how its illegal, immoral and incompetent invasion of Iraq caused a spike in worldwide terrorist attacks and the metastasizing of international terrorism.

Take another example: “So I believe that it’s in the interests of all of us that we have an Iran…that gives up its weapons ambitions.” Insert “a United States” and recall that the U.S. spends as much on weapons as the rest of the world. Then ask why it is pursuing its own line of new, more robust nuclear weapons under the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program.

Here’s a classic in psychological projection: “And I must tell you that the current leadership there [in Iran] is a big disappointment to the people of Iran.” Yes, but Iran’s leaders are mere amateurs at national disappointment, when compared with the professionals in the Bush administration.

Finally, consider one more case of the pot calling the kettle black: “The people of Iran could be doing a lot better than they are today. But because of the actions of this government, the country is isolated.” True, but then consider Glenn Greenwald’s recent analysis of the worldwide Pew poll of public opinion.

According to Greenwald, “the polling data demonstrates that while America’s standing in the world is dangerously low on every continent in the world (the sole exception being Christian nations in Africa), pervasive anti-American sentiment has emerged only in the last six years.” [Greenwald, “The tragic collapse of America’s standing in the world,” salon.com July 5, 2007] Yes, the world hates us and we’ve lost much influence, thanks to Bush.

Thus, the conclusion appears inescapable: When Bush becomes the pot that calls the kettle black, it’s because he’s still living in a bubble After all, he appears far too ignorant to be taunting the impotence of his domestic opponents with such a wicked sense of irony.
That being the case, all we can expect is more bad news based upon lies - both for citizens of the United States and the world - unless Bush is impeached, convicted and removed from office (but after Cheney). ++

To save America, we need another 9/11
Stu Bykofsky, Philadelphia Daily News
Thu, Aug. 09, 2007

ONE MONTH from The Anniversary, I’m thinking another 9/11 would help America.

What kind of a sick bastard would write such a thing?

A bastard so sick of how splintered we are politically - thanks mainly to our ineptitude in Iraq - that we have forgotten who the enemy is.

It is not Bush and it is not Hillary and it is not Daily Kos or Bill O’Reilly or Giuliani or Barack. It is global terrorists who use Islam to justify their hideous sins, including blowing up women and children.

Iraq has fractured the U.S. into jigsaw pieces of competing interests that encourage our enemies. We are deeply divided and division is weakness.

Most Americans today believe Iraq was a mistake. Why?

Not because Americans are “anti-war.”

Americans have turned their backs because the war has dragged on too long and we don’t have the patience for a long slog. We’ve been in Iraq for four years, but to some it seems like a century. In contrast, Britain just pulled its soldiers out of Northern Ireland where they had been, often being shot at, almost 40 years.

That’s not the American way.

In Iraq, we don’t believe our military is being beaten on the battleground. It’s more that there is no formal “battleground.” There is the drip of daily casualties and victory is not around the corner. Americans are impatient. We like fast food and fast war.

Americans loved the 1991 Gulf War. It raged for just 100 hours when George H.W. Bush ended it with a declaration of victory. He sent a half-million troops into harm’s way and we suffered fewer than 300 deaths.

America likes wars shorter than the World Series.

Bush I did everything right, Bush II did everything wrong - but he did it with the backing of Congress.

Because the war has been a botch so far, Democrats and Republicans are attacking one another, when they aren’t attacking themselves. The dialog of discord echoes across America.

Turn back to 9/11.

Remember the community of outrage and national resolve? America had not been so united since the first Day of Infamy - 12/7/41.

We knew who the enemy was then.

We knew who the enemy was shortly after 9/11.

Because we have mislaid 9/11, we have endless sideshow squabbles about whether the surge is working, if we are “safer” now, whether the FBI should listen in on foreign phone calls, whether cops should detain odd-acting “flying imams,” whether those plotting alleged attacks on Fort Dix or Kennedy airport are serious threats or amateur bumblers. We bicker over the trees while the forest is ablaze.

America’s fabric is pulling apart like a cheap sweater.

What would sew us back together?

Another 9/11 attack.

The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago’s Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda.

Is there any doubt they are planning to hit us again?

If it is to be, then let it be. It will take another attack on the homeland to quell the chattering of chipmunks and to restore America’s righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail.

The unity brought by such an attack sadly won’t last forever.

The first 9/11 proved that. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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